139 Responses to “Open Thread”

“If I get somebody I don’t know coming into my store with a gun on their side, I don’t know if it’s for their protection or they are going to rob me,” said Mr. Shop Owner, who buys, sells and trades jewelry. “I’m not going to take the chance. I believe in everybody protecting themselves. But there’s idiots out there.

Transgender people will be allowed to serve openly in the U.S. military, the Pentagon announced Thursday, ending one of the last bans on service in the armed forces.

Saying it’s the right thing to do, Defense Secretary Ash Carter laid out a yearlong implementation plan declaring that “Americans who want to serve and can meet our standards should be afforded the opportunity to compete to do so.”

“Our mission is to defend this country, and we don’t want barriers unrelated to a person’s qualification to serve preventing us from recruiting or retaining the soldier, sailor, airman, or Marine who can best accomplish the mission,” Carter said at a Pentagon news conference.

Under the new policy, by Oct. 1, transgender troops already serving should be able to receive medical care and begin formally changing their gender identifications in the Pentagon’s personnel system.

A year from now, he said, the military services will begin allowing transgender individuals to enlist, as long as they meet required standards and have been stable in their identified genders for 18 months.

Wonderful – another unstable class with guns. 18 months? Is that enough? I doubt it.

The first U.S. fatality using self-driving technology took place in May when the driver of a Tesla S sports car operating the vehicle’s “Autopilot” automated driving system died after a collision with a truck in Florida, federal officials said Thursday.

The government is investigating the design and performance of Tesla’s system.

Preliminary reports indicate the crash occurred when a tractor-trailer rig made a left turn in front of the Tesla at an intersection of a divided highway where there was no traffic light, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said. The Tesla driver died due to injuries sustained in the crash, which took place May 7 in Williston, Florida, the agency said. The city is southwest of Gainesville.

Tesla said on its website that neither the driver nor the Autopilot noticed the white side of the trailer, which was perpendicular to the Model S, against the brightly lit sky, and neither applied the brakes.

“The high ride height of the trailer combined with its positioning across the road and the extremely rare circumstances of the impact caused the Model S to pass under the trailer,” the company said. The windshield of the Model S collided with the bottom of the trailer.

By the time firefighters arrived, the wreckage of the Tesla — with its roof sheared off completely — was hundreds of feet from the crash site where it had come to rest in a nearby yard, assistant chief Danny Wallace of the Williston Fire Department told The Associated Press. The driver was pronounced dead, “Signal Seven” in the local firefighters’ jargon, and they respectfully covered the wreckage and waited for crash investigators to arrive.

The bipartisan jailbreak legislation — known as the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act — is dead in this session of Congress. Sens. Dick Durbin and John Cornyn, key backers of the Act, have basically conceded defeat.

ENERGIEWOOPSIE, OR, WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DUMP NUCLEAR POWER
The greens have been aflutter for years about Germany’s energiewende, or “energy revolution,” partly because it involves a lot of their sacred windmills and solar panels and partly because it’s a revolution man, so dig it!

Better put the patchouli-infused hemp robes away for the moment, because Germany is backpedalling fast. From Reuters yesterday:

Germany has abandoned plans to set out a timetable to exit coal-fired power production and scrapped C02 emissions reduction goals for individual sectors, according to the latest draft of an environment ministry document seen by Reuters on Wednesday.

An earlier version of the draft document that was leaked in May had suggested that Germany should phase out coal-fired power production “well before 2050” as part of a package of measures to help Berlin achieve its climate goals.

The new version, which was revised following consultation with the economy and energy ministry, has also deleted specific concrete C02 emissions savings targets for the energy, industry, transport and agriculture sectors.

The document forms the government’s national climate action plan for 2050 and lays out how it plans to move away from fossil fuels and achieve its goal of cutting CO2 emissions by up to 95 percent compared to 1990 levels by the middle of the century.

The original proposals met with hefty opposition from unions, coal-producing regions and business groups who said it would cost jobs and damage industry.

“Seven months after the successful climate summit in Paris the government is capitulating to the interests of the fossil fuel industry and missing the chance to give the economy a modernization impulse by presenting clear plans,” he said.

Another suggestion for an additional levy on petrol, heating oil and gas to increase demand for green technologies has also been scrapped, according to the document. However, the document does still mention plans for an ecological tax reform.

An alternative paragraph that said Germany would consider lobbying for the introduction of a minimum price on European carbon-dioxide emissions has also been taken out of the document.

DO YOU FEEL THE JOHNSON?
Forget “Feel the Bern.” Do you “Feel the Johnson”? As in Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate for president? The Johnson-Weld ticket is the most serious ticket the Libertarian Party has ever nominated, which to be sure is like being the tallest building in Wichita, but still, if ever the Libertarian ticket might actually contend it is this year.

TED CRUZ EXPOSES ADMINISTRATION’S WILLFUL BLINDNESS TO JIHAD
On Tuesday, Sen. Ted Cruz held a hearing of the Subcommittee on Oversight, Agency Action, Federal Rights and Federal Courts, which he chairs. The subject was the Obama administration’s willful blindness when it comes to radical Islamic terrorism.

I spent much of last evening reading Huma Abedin’s deposition in Judicial Watch’s FOIA lawsuit, which has raised questions about Hillary Clinton’s email practices. Having taken many depositions myself, I enjoy reading transcripts and evaluating the witnesses and lawyers.

I wrote here about seeing the documentary Weiner, and said that I found Abedin to be more likable than I had expected. She came across well in her deposition, too. She answered questions in an intelligent, clear and responsive manner. Of course, the most seemingly cooperative witness might not be telling the truth about a key point. But based on the transcript, there is no reason to evaluate Huma as anything but a straightforward witness.

In general, her testimony was consistent with what we have heard from the Clinton camp, only more clearly stated.

Which one would expect if they had spent copious amounts of time coordinating their story.

FOLLOW THE SCIENCE, THEY SAY
When it comes to the climate uber alles crowd, environmentalists insist we “follow the science.” Well let’s see whether Greenpeace follows this science. This morning in Washington DC there will be a press conference where a petition by 107 Nobel laureate scientists will call on Greenpeace to cease its reactionary opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The Washington Post reports:

More than 100 Nobel laureates have signed a letter urging Greenpeace to end its opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The letter asks Greenpeace to cease its efforts to block introduction of a genetically engineered strain of rice that supporters say could reduce Vitamin-A deficiencies causing blindness and death in children in the developing world.

“We urge Greenpeace and its supporters to re-examine the experience of farmers and consumers worldwide with crops and foods improved through biotechnology, recognize the findings of authoritative scientific bodies and regulatory agencies, and abandon their campaign against ‘GMOs’ in general and Golden Rice in particular,” the letter states.

And getting back to climate, mentioned in the opening of this bit, if one actually reads THE SCIENCE (not the computer models and derived FALSE conclusions, but rather the ACTUAL SCIENCE based on ACTUAL UNBIASED OBSERVATIONS) one finds that those who are full of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change Alarmism have NO IDEA what the science actually proves.

Open carry in urban areas is risky. Gangs have been known to take a liking to your sidearm and attack from behind to steal your weapon. I’ll stick to concealed carry for now. Bottom line, however, we are finally arming ourselves in increasing numbers and that’s a good thing.

Oakland has a very high poverty and crime rate. The
city could really use some decent jobs and an economic boost. The kind
of prosperity that being a transportation center has brought to
well-placed port cities for about as long as there have been cities. So,
of
course, the city council does this:

Nearly 1 million immigrants — including more than 170K convicts — ignoring deportation

Nearly 1 million immigrants are ignoring deportation orders to remain in the U.S. — including more than 170,000 convicted criminals, according to a new report Thursday that suggests the government’s deportation efforts are still falling short.
Only a small fraction of the immigrants are even being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), meaning most of them remain free on the streets, where they can commit crimes and continue living in the shadows, according to the study by Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies.
“The fact that almost 10 percent of the illegal resident population has already been ordered removed and is still here illustrates just how dysfunctional our immigration enforcement system is. It also should be of great concern that 20 percent of them are conviction criminals, and that most of these are at large in our communities,” Ms. Vaughan said.
She said the 925,193 aliens who were still here despite a deportation order break down into three categories. In some cases their home countries refuse to take them back, and U.S. officials feel constrained by law to release them; other times they are released by sanctuary cities, who help thwart deportations; and still others abscond on their own.
Mexicans account for the most aliens, with nearly 200,000 ignoring deportation orders. About a third of those are convicted criminals, Ms. Vaughan said. El Salvador accounts for more than 150,000 of the aliens, but just 10,000 of them are convicted criminals.

That top photo looks like, at first glance, a guy in a maroon colored shirt with dirty jeans on, putting his hand on the other guy’s hip, which means his crotch is on the dudes ass!! I thought it was a still from a gay night club at first glance!! Fruity fucking bastards!!

“We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others, the same word many mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name- liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names – liberty and tyranny.”
Abraham Lincoln
Source:April 18, 1864 – Address at Sanitary Fair, Baltimore, Maryland

“You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is the beginning of the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.”
Adrian Pierce Rogers (September 12, 1931 – November 15, 2005), was an American pastor, conservative, author, and a three-term president of the Southern Baptist Convention (1979-1980 and 1986-1988).

“Understand one thing……You can make laws against weapons but they will
be observed only by those who don’t intend to use them anyway. The
lawless can always smuggle or steal, or even make a gun. By refusing to
wear a gun you allow the criminal to operate with impunity.” – Louis
L’Amour

Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a
well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all,
enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy John Derbyshire

Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a
well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all,
enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy John Derbyshire

Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a
well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all,
enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy John Derbyshire

“We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others, the same word many mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name- liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names – liberty and tyranny.”
Abraham Lincoln
Source:April 18, 1864 – Address at Sanitary Fair, Baltimore, Maryland

Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a
well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all,
enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy John Derbyshire

“Understand one thing……You can make laws against weapons but they will
be observed only by those who don’t intend to use them anyway. The
lawless can always smuggle or steal, or even make a gun. By refusing to
wear a gun you allow the criminal to operate with impunity.” – Louis
L’Amour

“We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others, the same word many mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name- liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names – liberty and tyranny.”
Abraham Lincoln
Source:April 18, 1864 – Address at Sanitary Fair, Baltimore, Maryland

“Understand one thing……You can make laws against weapons but they will
be observed only by those who don’t intend to use them anyway. The
lawless can always smuggle or steal, or even make a gun. By refusing to
wear a gun you allow the criminal to operate with impunity.” – Louis
L’Amour

Datos, ne quisquam seruiat, enses. (The sword was given for this, that none need live a slave.) – Marcus Annaeus Lucanus
…………………………….One man with a gun can control 100 without one. Vladimir Lenin
…………………………….Character is destiny. – Heraclitus
…………………………….“Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.” Winston Churchill
…………………………….Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein
…………………………….“If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey, he is obligated to do so.” – Thomas Jefferson
…………………………….“Leave no authority existing not responsible to the people,” -Thomas Jefferson.
…………………………….Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny. – Robert Heinlein
…………………………….“Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.” Thomas Jefferson
…………………………….If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace. – Thomas Paine
…………………………….Never waste a good crisis Hillary Clinton
…………………………….“We want them registered” – Nancy Pelosi
…………………………….Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt. — Mark Twain
……………………………..“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel.
“This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.”
……………………………..“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” George Santayana
……………………………..Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it. – Thomas Sowell
……………………………..The urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it. H.L. Menkin
…………………………….I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery – Thomas Jefferson
…………………………….“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” –Thomas Sowell
…………………………….Distrust all men in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. – Friedrich Nietzsche
…………………………….“If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull.” W. C. Fields
……………………………………There is no such dichotomy as “human rights” versus “property rights.”
No human rights can exist without property rights. – Ayn Rand
………………………………………….“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” – Albert Einstein
………………………………………….The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave. – James Burgh, 1774
………………………………………….From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
Karl Marx
………………………………………….“You cannot have a proud and chivalrous spirit if your conduct is mean
and paltry; for whatever a man’s actions are, such must be his spirit.”
Demosthenes, Third Olynthiac
…………………………………………….I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it. -Thomas Jefferson

“Understand one thing……You can make laws against weapons but they will
be observed only by those who don’t intend to use them anyway. The
lawless can always smuggle or steal, or even make a gun. By refusing to
wear a gun you allow the criminal to operate with impunity.” – Louis
L’Amour

PREVENTING GUN VIOLENCE THROUGH EFFECTIVE MESSAGING
HIGH-PROFILE GUN VIOLENCE INCIDENTS
OVERVIEW
#1:DON’T HESITATE TO SPEAK OUT.
The truth is, the most powerful time to communicate is when concern and emotions are running at their peak.#3:DON’T ASSUME THE FACTS – AND DON’T WAIT FOR THEM
Experience tells us that the specific facts of a high-profile gun incident are revealed over time. If we jump to conclusions about those details, we could find ourselves at odds with reality as events unfold.
So, the smartest thing to do is avoid linking our message and arguments to any one set of partially-revealed facts.#8:DON’T LET POLICYSPEAK DRAIN THE EMOTION FROM THE MOMENT.
There is often a compelling case to be made for immediate action, pivoting from the emotion of a high-profile incident to calls for legislative action or specific policy changes. Those who seek to make that pivot have to be careful not to drain the emotional power out of the moment. An emotionally-driven conversation about what can be done to prevent incidents such as the one at hand is engaging.

There is no such dichotomy as “human rights” versus “property rights.”
No human rights can exist without property rights. – Ayn Rand
………………………………………….“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” – Albert Einstein
………………………………………….The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave. – James Burgh, 1774
………………………………………….From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
Karl Marx
………………………………………….“You cannot have a proud and chivalrous spirit if your conduct is mean
and paltry; for whatever a man’s actions are, such must be his spirit.”
Demosthenes, Third Olynthiac
…………………………………………….I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it. -Thomas Jefferson

There is no such dichotomy as “human rights” versus “property rights.”
No human rights can exist without property rights. – Ayn Rand
………………………………………….“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” – Albert Einstein
………………………………………….

Sowell: A public serviceConcealed guns protect not only those who carry them, but also those who do not. If concealed guns become widespread, then a mugger or a car jacker has no way of knowing who has one and who does not. It makes being a mugger or a car jacker a less safe occupation. Gun control laws are in effect occupational safety laws — OSHA for burglars, muggers, car jackers and others.

The fatal fallacy of gun control laws in general is the assumption that such laws actually control guns. Criminals who disobey other laws are not likely to be stopped by gun control laws. What such laws actually do is increase the number of disarmed and defenseless victims.

Mass shootings are often used as examples of a need for gun control. But what puts a stop to mass shootings? Usually the arrival on the scene of somebody else with a gun.

Mass shooters are often portrayed as “irrational” people engaged in “senseless” acts. But mass shooters are usually rational enough to attack schools, churches and other places where there is far less likelihood of someone being on the scene who is armed.

Seldom do we hear about these “irrational” shooters engaging in “senseless” attacks on meetings of the National Rifle Association or a local gun show or a National Guard armory.

The fallacy of believing that the way to reduce shootings is to disarm peaceful people extends from domestic gun control laws to international disarmament agreements. If disarmament agreements reduced the dangers of war, there would never have been a World War II.
– See more at: https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/12/a-public-service

“You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is the beginning of the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.”
Adrian Pierce Rogers (September 12, 1931 – November 15, 2005), was an American pastor, conservative, author, and a three-term president of the Southern Baptist Convention (1979-1980 and 1986-1988).

Total US Firearms: Not 300 Million, but 412-660 Million?
We believe that the correct number is much higher — somewhere between 412 and 660 million. You may wonder how we came to that number, so buckle up (and cringe, if you’re a math-phobe, although it never gets too theoretical): unlike most of the academics and reporters we linked above, we’re going to use publicly available data, and show our work.

What if we told you that one ATF computer system logged, by serial number, 252,000,000 unique firearms, and represented only those firearms manufactured, imported or sold by a relatively small number of the nation’s tens of thousands of Federal Firearms Licensees?

ATF maintains a system, introduced in 1999, called Access 2000 or A2K (GAO report; details are in the .pdfs linked at that .html link). This system allows voluntarily participating manufacturers, importers and wholesalers (no retailers) to enter their firearms by the identifying data that goes on a 4473 directly into an ATF computer. The firms can’t see the data on this system, they can only feed it in. This system is then used by the National Tracing Center in West Virginia to respond rapidly to trace requests: given serial number, make and model they can produce an instant hit, saving field agents a trip to the manufacturer, wholesaler, or jobber. Sometimes this hit can instantly tell the trace technician what retailer was the firearm’s point of first retail sale, really expediting the trace.
[..]For the total count of firearms in the USA to be 300 million, the following must be true:

(A2K + all firearms made and sold by non-A2K FFLs from 1999-2015 + all firearms made by everyone 1899-1999 + all firearms imported 1899-1999 + all firearms made or imported since October, 2015) – firearms exported = 300M.

It seems unlikely that 5/6 of all firearms were made or imported in the last 17 years.
[..]
We know that the ATF collects the records of out of business FFLs, and that these records are very slowly digitized but never OCR’d (they are legally forbidden to do this. They had preserved out of business records from A2K, which they deleted when GAO caught them [.pdf] in March, 2016. The preservation seems to have been inadvertent). The ATF can only estimate the number of out of business records as “hundreds of millions.”
[..]
One easy thing we can do is add 2016’s numbers, because we know they can’t be included in A2K’s 1999-2015 data set. Two ways to estimate 2016 production are to use FBI NICS checks (which are an imperfect measure) and NSSF adjusted NICS numbers (which are an attempt to make a conservative estimate by eliminating sources of upward bias in the FBI data, like one state’s monthly NICS on all permit holders). According to the FBI, there have been 19,872,694 NICS completed through 30 Sep, 2016; and NSSF adjusts that to a conservative 10,837,308.
[..]
We conversed with one manufacturer last year who said, not for attribution, that he had shipped in excess of 100,000 80% lowers in the previous year and was constrained by the production schedule of the forging subcontractor he used. Assuming 80% of those were spoiled by end users, ratholed for future use or held for resale, and only 20% completed (which seems to us like a very conservative estimate), then that’s 10,000 more from one off-the-books source.
[..]
At this point we have a reasonable and very conservative, very low estimate of 329 million new firearms to the US market 1999-2016. The question becomes one of estimating how many firearms were made and imported in the period from the invention of modern metallic cartridge, smokeless powder ammunition from, say, 1899 to 1998 — and how many of those survive as practical, usable firearms.

There are several ways to estimate this number:We can throw a Pareto 80/20 number out there (about 412-413 million);We can make a SWAG that about half the guns in circulation are pre-1999 (about 660 million);
We can comb old books for production data (TBD);
We can ask the ATF (we’re sure they’ll be forthcoming… right?);Absent a better idea, we can say that the US inventory of firearms is almost certainly between 412 and 660 million, not the lower numbers recently trumpeted in the media.http://weaponsman.com/?p=33875

“One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting.” – C.S. Lewis

There is no such dichotomy as “human rights” versus “property rights.”
No human rights can exist without property rights. – Ayn Rand
………………………………………….“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” – Albert Einstein
………………………………………….The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave. – James Burgh, 1774
………………………………………….From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
Karl Marx
………………………………………….“You cannot have a proud and chivalrous spirit if your conduct is mean
and paltry; for whatever a man’s actions are, such must be his spirit.”
Demosthenes, Third Olynthiac
…………………………………………….I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it. -Thomas Jefferson

What no politician wants to admit about gun controlUpdated by Dylan Matthews on June 13, 2016
President Barack Obama is clearly fed up. His speeches after mass shootings — speeches that have become a bit of a morbid ritual, given how regularly the shootings occur — have grown angrier, more emotional, and more disgusted at America’s gun violence problem and Congress’s unwillingness to do literally anything to stop it.

“This massacre is therefore a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or in a house of worship, or a movie theater, or in a nightclub,” Obama declared after the Pulse shooting in Orlando, the 133rd mass shooting of 2016. “And we have to decide if that’s the kind of country we want to be. And to actively do nothing is a decision as well.”

But let’s be clear about precisely what kind of decision is letting events like this recur. Congress’s decision not to pass background checks is not what’s keeping the US from European gun violence levels. The expiration of the assault weapons ban is not behind the gap. What’s behind the gap, plenty of research indicates, is that Americans have more guns. The statistics are mind-blowing: America has 4.4 percent of the world’s population but almost half of its civilian-owned guns.

Realistically, a gun control plan that has any hope of getting us down to European levels of violence is going to mean taking a huge number of guns away from a huge number of gun owners.

Other countries have done exactly that. Australia, for example, enacted a mandatory gun buyback that achieved that goal, and saw firearm suicides fall as a result. But the reforms those countries enacted are far more dramatic than anything US politicians are calling for — and even they wouldn’t get us to where many other developed countries are.

Think about it this way. In 2013, the US had 106.4 gun deaths per million people. In 2011, the last year for which we have numbers, the UK endured 146 gun deaths total — or 2.3 gun deaths per million people.

To get to UK levels, we’d need to reduce gun deaths by nearly 98 percent. Even if we wanted to reach the same levels as Finland — another developed country with a relatively high rate of gun deaths — we’d need to drop from 106.4 deaths per million to 35 — more than a 67 percent reduction.

And here’s the truth: Even the most ardent gun control advocates aren’t pushing measures that could close the gap. Not even close.What happened in Australia
Plenty of research has found a strong correlation between the amount of guns in an area and its gun homicide rate. Countries with more guns have more gun homicides. States with more guns have more gun homicides. Individuals with guns in the house are likelier to be killed or to kill themselves with guns.

So Australia’s 1996 gun control was based on a simple idea: They took away a bunch of guns.

After a 28-year-old man killed 35 people at the Port Arthur historic prison colony in Tasmania, Australia, a popular tourist destination, Prime Minister John Howard and his right-wing Liberal Party banned the importation of all semiautomatic and automatic rifles and shotguns, instituted a mandatory national buyback program for such guns, and convinced state governments to ban the weapons outright. In total, about 650,000 weapons — 20 percent of the country’s total arsenal by some estimates — were seized and destroyed.

Evaluations after the reforms suggest that they saved lives. A study by Andrew Leigh of Australian National University and Christine Neill of Wilfrid Laurier University estimated that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people led to a statistically significant drop in firearm suicides — 74 percent, in fact, with no parallel increase in non-firearm suicides. While gun control opponents have tried to rebut those results, those responses have been riddled with methodological flaws, and even some of the study’s critics have conceded that the laws likely cut down on suicides.

The results on homicides were a little less clear. Leigh and Neill found that the buyback resulted in a 35 to 50 percent decline in the gun homicide rate, but because of the low number of homicides in Australia normally, this change wasn’t statistically significant. Supporters of Australia’s policy often argue that no mass shootings have occurred since, which is only true for a certain restrictive definition, as in 2014 a man shot himself, his wife, and their three children in a murder-suicide in rural New South Wales.

There have also been a number of non-gun massacres in the years since the Port Arthur massacre. Also in 2014, a mother in a suburb of Cairns, Queensland, allegedly stabbed to death seven of her own children and one niece. In 2000, a man burned a backpackers’ hostel to the ground in Childers, Queensland, killing 15.

But the homicide and mass shooting results are almost beside the point. Nearly two-thirds of gun deaths in the US are suicides. If we can reduce them by 74 percent, we’d be saving more than 15,000 lives every year. That doesn’t get us to where most developed countries are, but it gets us in the ballpark of Finland.Why Australia’s laws couldn’t be adopted in the US (hint: it’s not because of the Constitution)

So could it happen in the US? The legal scholars I talked to suggested that an Australia-style program would probably pass muster. If we went further than Australia and also banned handguns, that might cause problems; the Supreme Court struck down Washington, DC’s handgun ban in 2008. But Australia’s actual system is probably constitutional.

“Courts have consistently upheld bans on military-style semiautomatic rifles because other firearms are equally useful for self-defense,” Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA and author of Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, says. “Gun control isn’t stalled because of the Second Amendment. It’s stalled because elected officials won’t pass effective new laws to reduce gun violence.”

Sanford Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas Austin and author of the landmark article “The Embarrassing Second Amendment,” concurs: “If such an extraordinary law actually got through Congress (meaning with necessary Republican support), then I find it impossible to imagine that there would be five votes on the Court to say no,” he says. “But the real problem, of course, is that there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of Congress actually passing any meaningful legislation re guns, let alone this kind of quite radical legislation.”

And there’s the rub. President Obama occasionally cites Australia in discussions about gun control, but proposals he and congressional Democrats have put forward stop far, far short of what Australia’s done. Obama’s plan to tackle gun violence focuses on universal background checks for gun sales, banning assault weapons again, and increasing criminal penalties for illicit gun traffickers. That’s nowhere near as dramatic as taking 20 percent of America’s guns off the street.

Australia provides strong evidence that a form of gun control can save lives. But it’s a form of gun control that’s too dramatic for most mainstream American politicians to embrace.Mild measures can do something — but not as much

For example, researchers have found that:
After Connecticut passed a law requiring gun purchasers to first obtain a license, gun homicides fell by 40 percent and suicides fell by 15.4 percent.
When Missouri repealed a similar law, gun homicides increased by 23 percent and suicides increased by 16.1 percent.
Both firearm homicides and overall homicides are lower in states that check for restraining orders (13 percent fewer firearm homicides) and fugitive status (21 percent fewer) before selling guns, and firearm/overall suicides are lower in states that check for fugitive status (5 percent fewer), misdemeanors (5 percent fewer), and mental illness (4 percent fewer).The national assault weapons ban did not decrease gun deaths in the US, though if it had existed longer it might have made certain shootings less lethal. The end of the assault weapon ban did meaningfully increase homicides in Mexico.

A Maryland law banning cheap, crummy handguns might have reduced gun homicides, but this effect was offset in part by customers rushing to purchase the guns before the ban took effect.

There are a few promising items there, especially when it comes to gun licensing. But taken together, this doesn’t look like an agenda that can get the US to European rates of gun deaths.

If you go by the Connecticut experience, licensing can nearly halve gun homicides — but that’s by far the most promising finding. Missouri’s experience suggests a much smaller effect. And the effects of various interventions aren’t additive. An assault weapons ban implemented without universal background checks is going to be more effective than one implemented alongside them, because some of the violence you’re trying to prevent would’ve been foiled by either policy alone.

I asked David Hemenway, a professor at Harvard’s public health school who has co-authored dozens of papers on the effects of guns and gun regulation on mortality, if he thought these kinds of smaller-bore reforms could have a big enough effect to bring the US down to European levels. “It’s all speculation,” he replied. “I suspect it would take a while (decades) for the US to get down to gun violence levels of other developed countries because a) we have so many guns which are durable, and b) we have a gun culture — we tend to use guns more often in more situations than citizens of other developed countries.”

It might be easier if there are positive feedback loops, he says — “if the rival gang doesn’t have guns, our gang has less need of guns” — but it’ll be an uphill battle.

Worse, even these milder-than-Australia policies are considerably more ambitious than legislation with a chance of passing Congress. The Manchin-Toomey bill, the only post-Newtown gun legislation to even come close to becoming law, didn’t even establish universal background checks, let alone mandate individual licensing, as Connecticut’s law does. Hillary Clinton’s proposed executive action — which would require more gun sellers to become licensed dealers — wouldn’t have to get Congress’s approval, but it’s even smaller-bore than Manchin-Toomey.

“Even getting half or a quarter of the way down to other nations would save a lot of lives,” Hemenway emphasizes. That’s undoubtedly true. Background checks, licensing requirements, and the like are positive steps. They save lives, and states should pass them. But America will still be a gun violence outlier, even with them.This problem is going to be really, really hard to solve

Research on guns is murky. It’s necessarily an area where it’s hard to do rigorous experimental research, so most studies are conducted after the fact, raising all kind of methodological challenges. That means it’s good to be skeptical of big claims from single studies — e.g., that licensing and background checks alone could cut gun homicides by 40 percent.

But we have accumulated some general knowledge all the same. Perhaps the single most supported contention in all of gun research is that more guns mean more gun deaths. The US doesn’t just have a gun violence problem because of its lax gun regulation. It has a problem because it has a culture that encourages large-scale gun possession, and other countries do not. That, combined with Australia’s experience, makes large-scale confiscation look like easily the most promising approach for bringing US gun homicides down to European rates.

Large-scale confiscation is not going to happen. That’s no reason to stop advocating it. (I also want to repeal all immigration laws and give everyone a monthly check from the government with no strings attached, and will argue for those ideas even though they’re not politically viable.) But it does mean that we should be realistic about what gun control with an actual shot of passage can achieve. It can make us safer. It cannot make us Europe.

There is no such dichotomy as “human rights” versus “property rights.”
No human rights can exist without property rights. – Ayn Rand
………………………………………….“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” – Albert Einstein
………………………………………….The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave. – James Burgh, 1774
………………………………………….From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
Karl Marx
………………………………………….“You cannot have a proud and chivalrous spirit if your conduct is mean
and paltry; for whatever a man’s actions are, such must be his spirit.”
Demosthenes, Third Olynthiac
…………………………………………….I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it. -Thomas Jefferson

This is the same guy, and I found this other video of his, where he shows off all the homemade guns he has made in the past and how well they worked, what went wrong, etc. Some very SIMPLE designs here! Especially the bolt action ones.https://youtu.be/RPPxp4KNZ3o

Law-Abiding Citizens Have More Than 600 Million Firearms in Americahttps://bearingarms.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/MERICA-2.0.jpg
I’ve also seen one that claims we have over 400 million guns and 24 trillion rounds of ammunition. The fact is, while there is no definitive way to tally all the firearms in the United States, it is commonly accepted and reported that there are roughly 300 million firearms in the hands of law-abiding Americans.

But has anyone else noticed that number hasn’t moved in years, even in the 8 years Obama sparked an increase in gun sales, the gun run during Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and after the NICS background checks system set new records for 15 straight months?So what if that “300 million” estimate is wrong?
According to Weapons Man, it is:

We believe that the correct number is much higher — somewhere between 412 and 660 million. You may wonder how we came to that number, so buckle up (and cringe, if you’re a math-phobe, although it never gets too theoretical): unlike most of the academics and reporters we linked above, we’re going to use publicly available data, and show our work.

What if we told you that one ATF computer system logged, by serial number, 252,000,000 unique firearms, and represented only those firearms manufactured, imported or sold by a relatively small number of the nation’s tens of thousands of Federal Firearms Licensees?

How to Ban Guns: A step by step, long term processBy sporks
Friday Dec 21, 2012 3:20 AM PST

The only way we can truly be safe and prevent further gun violence is to ban civilian ownership of all guns.The very first thing we need is national registry. We need to know where the guns are, and who has them.
[..]Along with this, make private sales illegal. When a firearm is transferred, make it law that the registration must be updated.
[..]
Now, maybe he sold them or they got lost or something. But it gives us a good target for investigation.
[..]
I’m concerned that other guy who bought a half dozen assault weapons, registered two hunting rifles, and belongs to the NRA/GOA. He’s the guy who warrants a raid.

#1:DON’T HESITATE TO SPEAK OUT.
The truth is, the most powerful time to communicate is when concern and emotions are running at their peak.#3:DON’T ASSUME THE FACTS – AND DON’T WAIT FOR THEM
The smartest thing to do is avoid linking our message and arguments to any one set of partially-revealed facts.#8:DON’T LET POLICYSPEAK DRAIN THE EMOTION FROM THE MOMENT.
There is often a compelling case to be made for immediate action, pivoting from the emotion of a high-profile incident to calls for legislative action or specific policy changes. Those who seek to make that pivot have to be careful not to drain the emotional power out of the moment. An emotionally-driven conversation about what can be done to prevent incidents such as the one at hand is engaging.http://gunssavelives.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Gun-ViolenceMessaging-Guide-PDF-1.pdf

Not even a week after the Las Vegas tragedy, Nancy Pelosi was approached by a concerned citizen about the right to self-defense and Pelosi’s answer is just what you imagined it would be. It fell flat and made no sense whatsoever.

“How does rendering me defenseless protect anybody else from a violent crime?” the young woman asked.

There is no such dichotomy as “human rights” versus “property rights.”
No human rights can exist without property rights. – Ayn Rand
………………………………………….“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” – Albert Einstein
………………………………………….The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave. – James Burgh, 1774
………………………………………….From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
Karl Marx
………………………………………….“You cannot have a proud and chivalrous spirit if your conduct is mean
and paltry; for whatever a man’s actions are, such must be his spirit.”
Demosthenes, Third Olynthiac
…………………………………………….I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it. -Thomas Jefferson

https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8a582a02fe4bad8f638177cd62d2da99c6a528560c9efd6b1cb3a98714d0e772.jpg Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the rights of citizens to keep and bear arms. This is not to say that firearms should not be very carefully used, and that definite safety rules of precaution should not be taught and enforced. But the right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.